When Mellowhost first launched her servers, all of them were using “DSO” module for serving php. I can remember, one of the most commonly used caching plugin was either Eaccelerator or Xcache. Eaccelerator was preferable as cpanel Easyapache have this in their option and can be compiled automatically while rebuilding apache. As time passed, we had to choose suphp instead of dso due to many factors involved. I hope to write them down at later time why we had to move to suphp. But that actually cut the idea of using dynamic cacher in the server. Suphp kills the php process after serving, this allows all the opcode cacher to be valueless. Due to cutting off a dynamic cacher, the server started showing pretty good load average. Although it was a good trade off of IO and CPU usage in cost of security. I was searching for a cacher that would work with suphp in the same technique Litespeed (A paid web server software) does.
How much data does Mellowhost have in their Backup?
It should be pretty known if you are a Mellowhost customer that we backup our servers on daily basis. We are currently using R1Soft CDP for each of our servers. All the backup servers are offsite, that means they are not hosted in the same server you are using with Mellowhost and not even in Softlayer network. Continue reading “How much data does Mellowhost have in their Backup?”
2Checkout
As we do not have an offline Credit Card processing option, we were planning to add 2Checkout for long time. We had been seeing many requests from “Africa” and Middle East countries requesting to use 2Checkout. We have finally made 2Checkout available for all types of Payment to Mellowhost services. You can now select 2Checkout from the Payment Option for new orders or paying the recurring bills. 2Checkout can be used for paying with Direct Credit Card.
Happy Hosting!
wp-supercache plugin for MH servers
I had written about using a cache plugin with all the wordpress blogs in order to reduce the CPU usage before. Although, some of our clients were complaining about issues with the most popular “wp-supercache” plugin with couple of our servers. We use some custom security protection which might block couple of wp-supercache commands. I here therefore, uploaded a workable version of latest wp-supercache 0.9.9.9 that works perfectly with our servers. You can download the latest version of wp-supercache compatible with our servers here:
http://mellowhost.com/downloads/wp-supercache.tar.gz
Wp-supercache is a property of its original author. More details about this plugin is available here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
48 restless hours!
RAID is not a backup solution, it is proved again! I was planning to write my experience of 48 hours from July 22 7:17 to July 24 7:23 GMT -5, couldn’t really manage to get some time. All the users who were in the Hemonto server should be aware about the recent issue we faced with our RAID. This post is just to elaborate how did we handle the situation.
Some good budget servers!
We use Softlayer and Liquidweb for all of our production servers. None of them is really a budget server provider. Softlayer does sell some budget servers which are not at all good for production servers planned for web hosting services due to their inability to upgrade in future (Like xpress servers). Moreover the price isn’t really right for the same set of hardwares with some other budget provider. We have been using budget servers for our backup servers which usually can hold tons of TBs of data.
Form Spam
I have monitoring this thing for long. It is really becoming a headache now. It continuously consuming a lot of CPU and Mysql resources for no reason. Form Spam like wordpress comment spam, directory registration/submission spam, forum spam consumes around 33% of the total CPU usage of a day in one of Mellowhost’s old server according to my calculation a couple of minutes ago. This consumption is pretty huge and grows as the server grows.
For some reason due to the development of auto scripts installer like Softaculous and Fantastico, users tend to try each script and leave them unattended. This keeps leaving form exploits for the botnet attackers. A wordpress blog without akismet is potentially threatened to form spam attack. Most of the phpbb forums contains no protection at all on the initial installation. These let the auto bot spammers to post their links in unattended forums/blogs to gain backlinks from their perspective.
This is not eventually only harmful for the server in realtime but also threaten the reputation of the shared IP. I have been working to try to develop a protection server wide to stop these spammers, but every attempt seems inadequate.
In many cases, it is hard to control or check manually as resellers add users and the users add many addon domains. It grows almost everyday. It is advised for every user, not to keep unattended blog/forum/script. It is always better to add some “Captcha” in all sort of registration form. Nowadays, spammers have broken the Captchas as well. Some people have already started some solution called Random questions. But anyway, there should be something like verification in the registration and the comments shouldn’t be allowed without registration. You can also add the Akismet plugin which is available for almost all the blogs and forums. It drastically reduces the number of spam and acts pretty quickly.
Protecting form spam is not only good for the server, but also good for your sites reputation. If you are hosting an unattended blog script inside one of your main site, than it may receive a serious damage of reputation in SEO if the unattended blog is regularly spammed by malicious users. So, check now, if you have any unattended script inside a folder, you should probably double check and delete it if it is not essential or protect it from auto botnets.
How to protect your WordPress blog from web injection
I have been thinking to write this post for long time, although, couldn’t get time to write details about this major security issue. From my experience, I have seen a big percentage of users are using WordPress and a certain percentage always face some sort of Web Injections (Iframe for example) with any shared hosting provider. This post would go into deep to study why these web injections are occurring and how can you protect your wordpress blog from these sort of issues.
Continue reading “How to protect your WordPress blog from web injection”
First Impression on Windows 7
I have been using my Macbook for all of my work from last year. My desktop had the old windows xp. I was using Livezilla client which has only windows application (We got Providesupport today replacing Livezilla, as it got mac client, should post a new topic on it). This is why I had to use the desktop as a part of business along with my macbook. I was planning to upgrade this box for a long time. Didn’t really have enough time to do so. Yesterday, I went to a Microsoft showroom here, and got a license for Windows 7 Professional. They took 165$ in local currency for the Windows 7 Professional. I was actually hoping for Windows 7 Ultimate, but the pricing for ultimate (215$) was out of my budget. I had upgraded my RAM and Motherboard couple of days ago after a recent crash of my graphics card. I was well aware that my current hardware configuration should sustain Windows 7 Pro.
Installation went smooth. It was pretty faster than Windows XP if I can remember (Last time, I installed windows was in 2007). After using Macbook for last one year, I was continuously losing my interest on windows. Mac OS X Leopard is fast, virus free and most importantly, it doesn’t crash so frequently like my windows did before. I wasn’t really expecting much from Windows 7 over Windows XP. But I have to say, I am pretty much amazed with the performance and design tactics. I find it way faster than XP and in some cases, it would beat my Mac. I was hearing about the hardware acceleration improvement on Internet Explorer 9 and waiting to try it. It really squeezes your net! I tested both IE 9 and FF 4 Beta 6 on my windows 7, and I can definitely feel IE is performing better than FF. Older IE had tremendous problem with the tab opening, but IE 9 has overcome the issue, it looks like. It is opening tabs faster than FF 4. Although, sites are loading fast, but the compatibility seems to be a problem with IE 9. It can not load lots of javascripts and css, so I assume, it has more to improve.
I specially like the design of Task manager in Windows 7. I was using Windows 2008 R2 in one of my windows VPS, and it is pretty similar to that one. Linux is having lots of tools to find the bottlenecks of a system from scratch. I have never seen windows feeling interest for it. There are lots of geeks who would feel to tweak their OS and find the best from it. Although, windows have always been casual to give such tools to end users. This time, I can see windows is feeling the need. They have a Resource Monitor service built in to allow users to track root level usage.
Quick preview system for the tasks seem pretty nice. I can remember in old XP, when I was using the IE 6 and having around 20-25 windows opened, and the task bar was filled with “…”.
They seem to be having lots of improvement in the process management. I tried running couple of injections on svchost and other services, it seems, the current structure simply discards them. Even though, those were working with the latest update of windows xp. I read an article on Windows Server 2008 around a year ago, regarding the process architecture of it, and if I can remember correctly, Windows is more on following the linux architecture day by day. Users permission on process management is becoming more important. I would definitely work with it in later time and post a detailed report for Mellowhost blog readers 🙂
I have spent 6 hours till now with windows 7 professional edition, and I have say, I am impressed. You do need a good configuration to run it, but it is nevertheless a waste anymore. Keep up the good work Microsoft.
An Idea of Quality Analysis Department!
Mellowhost is nearly touching it’s 4th Anniversary in the hosting business. We have worked hard in last years to make the hosting environment more innovative and perfect for our clients. In most of the situations we have tried our level best to give the best performance you can ever expect from a shared hosting environment.
There are many reviews from our clients in different places. There were some situations, we have seen our customers misunderstanding and expressing their feelings. It is pretty hard to make an environment suitable for every sort of users, but our target is and was always to make it right for all. We have worked with all possible clients to overcome the understanding we had to make it positive in every possible aspects.
Contacting the host is probably the best choice to clear the ideas. It helps both parties to come to an understanding. I have seen some users in past who were having some issues with their CMS, but thinking it was a server issue. Even though, we do not provide 3rd party support, but to make the situation go right and concluding the misunderstanding, we have worked with the client to fix his/her CMS. The root factor to conclude this sort of situations is to contact.
We are planning to start a “Quality Analysis Department” which will be aimed to keep in touch with our clients. One can submit any sort of feedbacks (Example: unsatisfactory support, unsatisfactory server performance, unsatisfactory uptime etc. which makes you unsatisfied with the service) through the desk to our Quality Analyst. We will start digging on your query and try to find a way to solve your problem with the co-operation of other respective departments. Our Quality Analyst team will try to monitor ticket activity to find user’s satisfaction level. In case, we feel, one is unsatisfied with a specific reason, we will immediately contact him/her with the possible solutions we can provide to solve the case through QA Desk. A little co-operation from clients may solve these sorts of unwanted situations.
We are in the process of training our human resources to be a Quality Analyst. This process is still going and we expect to launch this department within November.
Happy Hosting!